This invention relates to the analysis of coal for its impurities such as oxygen, sulfur, and others. More specifically, it relates to a system which takes advantage of the photonuclear interaction to make possible the accurate and rapid determination of these impurities in an "on line" situation. It is well known that such information is of great importance to the efficient and clean operation of coal-fired power plants.
Present techniques of obtaining the impurity information are: (1) conventional chemistry, which is quite slow and is not always representative of the coal being burned at any given instant, and (2) neutron-capture-gamma and activation analysis which, although being much faster than chemistry, suffers from difficulties of count rates, shielding, and processing rate.